Today, when I was shooting some elevator pitch videos for Informatics Ventures TV I encountered a challenging lighting situation. I wanted to feature the amazing view from the top floor of Appleton Tower (home of Informatics Ventures at the University of Edinburgh), without super powered lights and the resulting excessive heat they generate. So i decided instead of trying to match the exterior brightness, I’d cut the exterior brightness using ND (Neutral Density) gel/filter.

I took a visit to Northern Light, technical event production peeps, and bought some of their finest ND16 (a mighty 4 stops). And voila! Here you can see the usually blown out bright exterior, but the middle pane has been darkened by the gel taped to the window. Pretty as a picture, and a beautifully exposed view over Edinburgh and Fife.

The Scottish Older People’s Assembly is a one-day conference is for older people and their representatives from across Scotland to debate key issues including active ageing, pensions and personal finance and reshaping care for older people.

The conference was webcast on 25th October 2011. The videos below include presentations from Highland Senior Citizens’ Network and Dumfries & Galloway Seniors Forum plus a link to older people from House in the Park care complex in Hamburg, Germany. The keynote speakers are Nicola Sturgeon MSP and Steve Webb, Minister of State for Pensions, speaking live from Westminster.

Like theatre? Fancy watching it online? You’re in for a treat, and from the comfort of your own home!

24 hours of live theatre starts at 5pm Tuesday 21st June 2011. Right here: Five Minute Theatre. It is brought to you by National Theatre of Scotland in celebration of five dramatic years producing cutting edge theatre. Both live theatre and pre-recorded shows from national and international submissions will be shown round the clock. Take a look at the schedule.

I am one of the technical consultants for the logistics of the live video stream, on behalf of Envirodigital and will be one of three Production Vision Mixers for the duration of the event at the NTS HQ in Glasgow alongside the large NTS team.

Follow @NTSonline for updates and use the #fiveminutetheatre hashtag. If you watch be sure to say hi on the chat.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you should know that Culture Hack Scotland happened! Hosted by festivalslab the Edinburgh Festivals Innovation Lab and co-produced with Rohan of festivalslab; Suzy from Trigger; and myself (on behalf of AmbITion Scotland). After co-producing the Culture Hack Day, London in January I was in a good position to advise on how to collect the data, issues to circumnavigate and what’s needed for an event like this.

What a wonderful, prolific, and confirming event it was. Like a breath of fresh air tinged with the smell of data being crunched and squooshed into a mighty fine showcase. This event demonstrated the talent of the tech scene in Scotland and the need for the cultural sector to have some kind of ongoing forum for work of this nature. Check it out on this video i put together:

Wowzer! A top event put on by the impressive #begoodbesocial team. I was honoured to support the event and web streamed it free of charge and enjoyed every minute of it. Great atmosphere, good topics and a superb example of using QR at an event, summarised nicely here by Hugh Wallace.